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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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@eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Paperclipped

Y'all have said that, should we have any ideas for Jiraiya's Seal Horde, to ping you. And @Kylinger, over in the Discord, had an amazing idea: Jiraiya's Seal Horde should contain a bunch of storage seal/explosive variants, stolen from the people he beat. That way, y'all don't need completely new mechanics or worldbuilding considerations.

Here are some of my personal submissions:

  • Storage Seal Variants
    • A storage seal variant that releases a soft, pleasant chime sound when unsealed
    • A storage seal variant that releases a loud, musical sound when unsealed
    • More activation uses
      • A handful of 225
      • A couple of 250
      • A few 300.
    • A longer-lasting version of Usamatsu's Preserver Seal
      • No duration given for standard (suggestion: 3-6 hours, covers a training block or two spent on paperwork)
      • Improved Version: 12-24 hours (useful for a Jiraiya hiding up for spying/ambush)
    • A small seal chain with progressively less storage-stress.
      • The final seal only generates ~50% less stress. This also has much less activation uses than a normal storage seal (~75 uses, compared to the normal ~200). This means that containers can be made of more fragile/cheaper material.
    • Variants with a larger weight/size capacity, and proportionately less activation uses/more storage stress.
      • A handful of 1.25m/125kg variants (175 uses)
      • Some 1.5m/150kg variants (150 uses)
      • A few 2m/200kg variants. (100 uses)
    • A massive, safe storage seal
      • 50% less storage stress, 2m/200kg limits, but only 25 activation uses
    • The Vault
      • A storage seal with 50% less storage stress, 2m/200kg limits, and 200 activation uses
    • A storage seal variant that unseals items at a different location than the normal (~12cm difference?)
    • A storage seal variant that flings a stored item at combat speed (+3 to RW)

  • Explosive Seal Variants
    • Some severely substandard explosive seal variants that are objectively worse than the standard explosive seal.
      • Seals that are Weapons: 1, Single Target AOE, TN 20, etc. Jiraiya speculates that these were intended to be used as early-research for new sealmasters.
    • Some substandard explosive seal variants
      • Weapons: 3, normal AOE
      • Normal WR, single-target + melee AOE
    • Dozens of explosive seal variants whose only change is that they release a more colorful explosion. Can be folded into any of the other suggestions, as well.
      • While black seems to be the majority (perhaps to imitate the legendary Black Bakushin), there are a still a variety of other colors --silvery grey, neon pink, bright yellow, lilac purple, and YOUTHFUL green, to name just a few.
    • Explosive seal variants that generate tags
      • Weapons: 2, and has an AOE of "single target," but releases a loud bang that causes anyone hit by the explosion to receive a Fragile Aspect relating to hearing difficulty.
      • Weapons: 2, and has an AOE of "single target," but whose explosion emits a bright white light, causing anyone hit by the explosion to receive a Fragile Aspect related to sight difficulty. User gets a free tag.
      • Weapons: 2, and has a normal AOE of "same zone." Generates a loud bang and a particularly bright explosion. Anyone hit by the explosion receives a Fragile Aspect related to sensory overload. User gets a free tag.
      • Weapons: 3, but creates an Environmental Aspect within the Zone about noxious odors. User gets a free tag.
      • Weapons: 4, normal AOE. The explosion is that of bright, burning blue fire. Anyone who gets hit by it receives a Fragile Aspect relating to being burned. User gets a free tag.
    • A 10-seal research chain of variant explosive seals that end in an explosive seal with a Weapons: 5, TN of 50, to dodge. The last few seals have vastly diminishing returns.
    • An explosive seal variant that works the same as standard, but has an AOE of "same zone, and one contiguously adjacent zone." Jiraiya notes that Kagome was, perhaps, not the first person to make Directional Explosives, but that Kagome's version has notable improvements on the one that Jiraiya has access to.
    • The Biggest Boom
      • WR: 6
      • TN 60
      • Same Zone and all adjacent zones
      • The explosion is that of a vibrant rainbow hue
      • Generates the sound of Kagome cackling in the background

I've also attached a shameless bribe: 🍪
 
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.....we should really suggest that Naruto order Orochimaru to turn over copies of his rift runes to us.

Essie battles are crazy, and we really want a backup for if Orochimaru is temporarily killed.

Also, I don't trust that snake an inch, and having our plan be completely dependent on his cooperation sucks.
What if once the Akatsuki are dead, he steals the rift and goes missing? What if he deliberately "missplaces" it?

I'd much rather have Hazou do the rune, or at least be looking over Oro's shoulder to check his work and keep him honest.
 
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Alright thread, it's time for us to live up to the Brainy react on the first post. Let's figure out where Ami went !

I predict she's off to create AMITY 2 by directly negotiating between the Five. But this time she's not just a diplomat, she's also representing the entirety of human consciousnesses. Her legitimacy stems from her newfound ability to create an internal Ami for every possible Type Of Guy, and to embody each one as a shadow clone.
 
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Left-Hand Mutant said:
.....we should really suggest that Naruto order Orochimaru to turn over copies of his rift runes to us.

Essie battles are crazy, and we really want a backup for if Orochimaru is temporarily killed.

Also, I don't trust that snake an inch, and having our plan be completely dependent on his cooperation sucks.
What if once the Akatsuki are dead, he steals the rift and goes missing? What if he deliberately "missplaces" it?

I'd much rather have Hazou do the rune, or at least be looking over Oro's shoulder to check his work and keep him honest.
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Could explain to Naruto that, based on Hazo and Kagome's preliminary research, by far the easiest way to actually open the rift would involve two sealmasters working together, one from each side. The one on the afterlife side would need to have prodigious chakra reserves, which Oro recently demonstrated.
 
Sir Stompy said:
Do we want Naruto to order us to turn over copies of all our runes? By any measure Hazou is far more fragile than Orochimaru. He literally returned from the dead once already.
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Hazou needs to use his rune(s) before the big essiefight starts. He'll be bodyguarded by essies, then reverse-summon away. Until he gets the all-clear.

Orochimaru is going to-to-toe with other essies, and we need him to make his rune right *after* the fight.

One of these needs redundancy much more than the other.


On one hand, Naruto presumably mistrusts Orochimaru, and wouldn't mind have Hazou double-check his work to keep him honest.

On the other hand, Naruto presumably mistrusts Orochimaru, and doesn't want to give him techniques that would let him single-handedly take on leaf, or amass enough power that he no longer listens to the tower.

Yeah, I feel pretty good about this.
 
Left-Hand Mutant said:
Yeah, I feel pretty good about this.
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You're huffing copium if you think this is going to play out the way you want. I see a couple ways it could play out.

1) Naruto probably refuses to do this and chews us out. Eh we've been chewed out before. Embarrassing, and the thread will have puppies but not the end of the world

2) Naruto takes it to Orochimaru and he then (predictably) refuses. He might leave it at that, but he might also then guess who put Naruto up to it.

He is deeply unhappy about this. Angry even. Does he kill Hazou? Likely not, but uncertain. Certainly he isn't interested in any more collaborations.

Notice that in no universe does Oro roll over like a dog and agree to this. Why would he? Naruto isn't a threat to him. There isn't a compelling case to be made for doing it. If he gets killed we could just go off his notes.
 
I'm genuinely curious. I know we built Hazo/Keiko around the Shadow Clone/Resolve track to go FOOM. Assuming the quest ends in a year due to Akatusuki, was that the right call? Did we get enough FOOM time to pay for the opportunity cost? Or would Hazo/Keiko have been a better ninja if we'd instead dumped all the xp built around shadow clones toward other things instead? (maybe higher sealing/rune crafting? Combat? Earthshaping? TN hacking? I dunno)

Just curious how much FOOMing has "helped us" compared to the baseline, so to speak.

Without FOOM where would we be right now?
 
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CitizenTen said:
Assuming the quest ends in a year due to Akatusuki, was that the right call? Did we get enough FOOM time to pay for the opportunity cost?
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Yes

CitizenTen said:
Or would Hazo/Keiko have been a better ninja if we'd instead dumped all the xp built around shadow clones toward other things instead? (maybe higher sealing/rune crafting? Combat? Earthshaping? TN hacking? I dunno)

...

Without FOOM where would we be right now?
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No

Pretty straightforward. I don't have calcs on hand but Resolve and SC are both enormously useful in their own right before FOOM enters the equation.
 
CitizenTen said:
Just curious how much FOOMing has "helped us" compared to the baseline, so to speak.
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FOOM is the only reason you have leveled Resolve as high as you have and offhand I can think of at least two occasions where you would have died without it: the bats and the leopards. The sealing failure that made the caves might count as well, although that one is debatable since it would have played out very differently without Shadow Clone.
 
eaglejarl said:
FOOM is the only reason you have leveled Resolve as high as you have and offhand I can think of at least two occasions where you would have died without it: the bats and the leopards. The sealing failure that made the caves might count as well, although that one is debatable since it would have played out very differently without Shadow Clone.
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Also, a stupidly high Resolve stat has allowed us to endure Tsunade and Orochimaru's rage on more than one occasion. Which is no small feat for someone as squishy has Hazou.
 
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should we add rrb to catears stack? on one hand it lets us run away and in the sky which is good given how squishy hazou is. on the other hand being in the sky presents as an aggro drawer for ranged attacks/ninjutsu
edit: although i guess catears would only trigger one burst from rrb unless we fiddle something complicated.
edit2: if we stack rrb horizontally maybe we can escape even faster
 
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If we can cook up the Dragon's Roar Rune or something similar then we'll be raking in the ROI on those stats too tbh.
 
Thanks guys for replying! Onward to the replies:

RandomOTP said:
IIRC, Kei is already XP-positive (in terms of XP-returns versus xp-investment) and Hazou is either approaching that line, or has already crossed it.
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Paperclipped said:
Kei has earned 2980 SC XP, and Hazou has earned 1830 SC XP (+5% Resolve XP). Note that though Hazou's SC XP is lower, he's derived other benefits such as parallelized sealing research and rapid reading of various lootboxes.
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Innnnnnteresting.... It's much more of a wash then I would have originally guessed. Eyeballing it, resolve cost ~1800 and shadow clone ~800. So it's probably currently a wash for Hazo rn and Kei has barely benefited? And with the pyramid being a thing, the opportunity cost is brutal. Having resolve as the best stat is kinda weak tbh and it doesn't look like we're gonna get another 60-69 anytime soon. Having a 60-69 technique or sealing level would kinda slap.


eaglejarl said:
FOOM is the only reason you have leveled Resolve as high as you have and offhand I can think of at least two occasions where you would have died without it: the bats and the leopards. The sealing failure that made the caves might count as well, although that one is debatable since it would have played out very differently without Shadow Clone.
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I'm kinda discounting those incidents as with a different build both those events seem very survivable.

RandomOTP said:
Also, a stupidly high Resolve stat has allowed us to endure Tsunade and Orochimaru's rage on more than one occasion. Which is no small feat for someone as squishy has Hazou.
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Doesn't seem that important tbh. We've still mainly failed, and having a higher presence/rapport probably would have gone further in life.

DanZapman said:
I don't have calcs on hand but Resolve and SC are both enormously useful in their own right before FOOM enters the equation.
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Paperclipped said:
he's derived other benefits such as parallelized sealing research and rapid reading of various lootboxes.
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How so? I'm assuming the counterfactual world is something close to SC at level ~20. I don't know the rules enough to say, but I'm assuming that gets you at least one shadow clone (maybe two)? The marginal amount of time an extra copy of yourself saves you as a percent diminishes pretty fast. (50%, 33%, 25%, 20%, etc)

My impression was (from the narrative and the thread conversations) that FOOM is this super secret, killer app that allows Hazo and co. to kick ass and punch well above their weight in training, XP, and combat for their age. On reading your responses, and browsing the spreadsheets, it seems that roughly 95% of Hazo's ability to be a real powerful force in this world is his cracked imagination (due to us) and his sealing ability? And the shadow clones have been sorta a rounding error so far and haven't done much for our family (yet)?

(This isn't to say that shadow clones won't be absolutely cracked once we get time speed up runes going)


How wrong/right am I?
 
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CitizenTen said:
My impression was (from the narrative and the thread conversations) that FOOM is this super secret, killer app that allows Hazo and co. to kick ass and punch well above their weight in training, XP, and combat for their age. On reading your responses, and browsing the spreadsheets, it seems that roughly 95% of Hazo's ability to be a real force in this world is his cracked imagination (due to us) and his sealing ability? And the shadow clones have been sorta a rounding error so far?
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Multiplicative boosts to your growth curve pay dividends after you recoup the starting costs. As things go (and since we're cursed to toss a massive pile of that XP into the research stat pile), the point was (more or less) that we'd be sitting pretty after the kid hits his late teens and then its all uphill from there.

It was never going to be a massive power gain in the short term, since spreadsheet magic is about playing for the long haul.
 
Plus, if we had higher traditional fight stats, we may have been thrown into the meat grinder during wartime, but instead our sealing and 7th path stuff and leadership were more worth the trade off. Resolve is one of those stats that's useful, but not obvious in the same ways, so it's good for us to build up without getting attention. I think that's why both Akane and Kei had plans to build up defensive skills before offensive, so they wouldn't get killed off for being glass cannons.

Instead, with SC at 40 we could do a bunch of research we couldn't have gotten through otherwise. If a lot of our utility comes from sealing, then FOOM giving us more ability to do sealing has to be weighed accordingly. We're getting through twice as many projects because of it, and given some of those projects are "+20% to stat seals" and "defend leaf from aerial bombardment", that matters.

Plus, and I don't think I've seen this listed before, FOOM gave us the major advantage of "be able to dump huge amount of XP into a specific thing when we need it", by basically being an XP sink early on, when nothing was super pressing, to give payoff later. So when we realized we needed to put a bunch of XP into earth shaping, or discovered the paradigm of PS, etc, we could put XP into those at a faster rate than normal. Same with the good techniques from Oro that we didn't have access to until recently. Even leaving aside what FOOM does for Snowflake, or for multitasking, or making sure we always have seals and lootboxes and research on the go, it allows us to Pivot to new shiny, in a way that shapes the EN. At least, that's always been part of my take on it. Past prep, for current growth OR flexibility.
 
Thanks! Also, what's the current plan with regards to Minatosealing (Namikaze Minato's Revolutionary Soon-to-be-World-Changing Uber-Sealing Style (Note to Self: Come Back and Name This Later)? Is there something specific we want to do with a seal anchored to our chakra system, or are we just chasing shinnies and hoping it's useful for something?
 
CitizenTen said:
Thanks! Also, what's the current plan with regards to Minatosealing (Namikaze Minato's Revolutionary Soon-to-be-World-Changing Uber-Sealing Style (Note to Self: Come Back and Name This Later)? Is there something specific we want to do with a seal anchored to our chakra system, or are we just chasing shinnies and hoping it's useful for something?
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Column A and Column B, but people have noted that making some sort of chakra battery or internal capacitor to artificially increase our reserves would basically pay out the invested XP by itself. "I summon Cannai!" is a pretty solid opener, and well, Oro seems to be of the same mind with his astronomical reserves (gained through biosealing, almost assuredly).
 
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